An e-procurement package for the Higher Education Sector, launched jointly by @UK and Barclaycard Commercial, gives participating universities guaranteed cost savings. The joint campaign follows recent news that the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has earmarked up to £6m for an e-procurement fund.

£5 m of the funding has been reserved for individual universities to help them establish an eMarketplace, and HEFCE has retained the additional £1m to establish a generic eMarketplace for the 129 Higher Education Institutions.

Universities had to apply for funding of up to £60K by 3rd September. They have received their funding offers – estimated to be between £2 and £3m - and are now in the process of procuring appropriate technologies. This funding must be spent – and solutions implemented – by March 2011.

Says @UK Chairman Ronald Duncan: ‘Our current campaign with Barclaycard Commercial builds on our joint work in the NHS. Barclaycard are market leaders in the Higher Education Sector, and we believe that, this foundation, coupled with the guaranteed savings offered by our package will ensure rapid acceptance by the universities.’

He continues ‘Other Government sectors are seeking to achieve in year savings after the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review, and we believe that we have a unique solution that both maximises savings whilst exceeding green objectives.’

The new package offers a combination of integrated technologies which include a spend analysis, green analysis, eMarketplace and securely embedded Government Procurement Card. The mixture of technologies is designed to provide each participating University with guaranteed savings in the current year. The spend analysis will identify cashable savings, as well as providing accurate data to forecast revenues from the use of the embedded Government Procurement Card. The eMarketplace will harness all of this information and provide a controlled environment for ongoing procurement and the identification of savings. ROI analysis shows that savings of £500,000 to £1m are achievable for organisations of this size, using this mix of technologies from the £ 100 billion of spend that has already been analysed by the @UK PLC Spend Analysis system SpendInsight.

Says Ronald Duncan:: ‘We are delighted to help the University sector achieve in year savings, given the world class contribution that they have made to our technology. We expect that other Government sectors will follow in seeking to maximise their savings whilst achieving their environmental targets using our Universities world class technology.”

Enquiries:

@UK PLC

Ronald Duncan

Chairman

Tel: 0118 963 7000

Beaumont Cornish Limited

Roland Cornish

Tel 0207 628 3396

Threadneedle Communications

Caroline Evans-Jones, Alex White

Tel 020 7653 9850

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Notes to Editors

@UK PLC is the UK market leader in Platform as a Service using Platform Generator and provides secure cloud based ecommerce, eprocurement and email services to business and the public sector with over 1 million users.

Platform Generator provides a leading UK electronic marketplace, has formed over 200,000 companies using the SiteGenerator ecommerce engine. @UK’s SiteGenerator ecommerce, part of the Platform Generator, allows suppliers to trade with all major finance systems, @UK’s marketplace and other leading marketplaces.

@UK has a Buying Solutions framework contract for the provision of its new “Spend Insight™” Spend Analysis services, that allows its services to purchased by any public sector body with out the requirement for a further tendering process. @UK has analysed over £ 100 billion in spend through SpendInsight™. SpendInsight provides the data for @UK PLC GreenInsight environmental analysis system and @UK PLC e2class database of 3.6 million classified items with environmental data.

SpendInsight was jointly developed with University of Reading and Goldsmiths College University of London.

@UK provides professional classification by Coding International a wholly owned subsidiary of @UK to e2class and a certified carbon neutral program. The carbon footprint data is provided by CenSA under its agreement with @UK. CenSA is a commercial offshoot from the research work carried out by Stockholm Environment Institute at University of York.

@UK's Platform Generator software speeds up secure software development and allows @UK to provides a secure internet eMarketplace enabling buyers such as local authorities, schools and hospitals to buy online from commercial suppliers ranging from large corporations to small to medium enterprises (“SMEs”). This allows buying and selling to take place with no paperwork and a reduced chance of errors through transposition, achieving major savings throughout the supply chain.

@UK has a key competitive advantage as an ecommerce based marketplace it ensures that prices are correct from requisition through to payment, where catalogue based marketplaces are unable to support carriage, complex pricing and configurable products. This combined with our secure ecommerce background is why Barclaycard are marketing our solution to its GPC customer base.

@UK also offers services to new businesses, including incorporation, company secretarial services and filing annual returns.

@UK is included in the Software and Computer Services Sector (9530). For further information please visit www.uk-plc.net